1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to heated supports for efficiently carrying out biological treatment of inorganic and/or organic compounds in wastewater and in the air, and to methods for manufacturing the supports and for environment remediation with the supports.
2. Description of the Related Art
Biological treatment in which wastewater and sewage are treated with microorganisms is widely adopted due to a relatively low cost. However, some kinds of microorganisms grow at slow rates, are easily poisoned, or are difficult to grow in their environment, and as a result, biological treatment is not always an efficient process in some cases. Hence, treating processes have been already put into practice in which biological treatment is carried out using an immobilized microorganism support, in which activated sludge or specific microorganisms have been immobilized beforehand inside the support by entrapment so as to actively form an environment suitable for the growth of the microorganisms.
As immobilizing materials for supporting (holding) microorganisms inside the materials, gel materials are usually employed, and they are required to have no harm to the environment, undergo no microbial change nor degradation, possess high mechanical strength, have the capacity of supporting microorganisms in large amounts, and the like. Gel materials put into practice so far are polyethylene glycol based polymers, polyvinyl alcohol based resins, and others, as described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 61-204089. On the other hand, as microorganisms to be immobilized in a gel material by entrapment are utilized activated sludge and pure-cultured microorganisms.
Recently, bacilli that are bacteria belonging to Bacillus subtilis are attracting attention as the microorganism. These bacilli have superior properties in the so-called clean-up of environmental pollutants, such as degradation of oil materials and high-concentration BOD components, degradation and removal of foul order components, improvement in the flocculation of excess sludge produced in biotreatment, and degradation of COD components, and technology utilizing pure strains has been investigated.
In order to carry out biological treatment of environmental pollutants employing bacilli, an immobilized microorganism support in which bacillary cells dominate and are supported at high concentrations must be manufactured. Conventionally, it is necessary to immobilize pure-cultured bacilli in a gel material, as shown in FIG. 9.
In this case, however, pure-culturing requires culturing tanks and large amounts of medium, and additionally has a disadvantage of entailing production costs in excess due to requiring a long period for culturing and thus necessitating high labor costs.